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Pot-au-feu, Au Bain-marie

A French stew of beef, veal, mutton, roasted fowl, and vegetables simmered for six hours in a pot sealed with a flour‑water paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pot-au-feu, Au Bain-marie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In an earthen pot, combine beef, veal, mutton, roasted fowl, and cold water.

  2. Add carrots, turnip, leeks, celery bundle, and onion.

  3. Cover the pot tightly with a paste made of flour and water to seal in steam.

Cook and strain

  1. Place the pot in a larger stewpan filled with water and bring to a boil.

  2. Maintain a steady boil for 6 hours, adding boiling water to the stewpan as needed.

  3. After 6 hours, remove the paste and strain the broth through a silk sieve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beef
Releases flavour and gelatin into the broth during long, slow simmering.
Veal fillet
Adds tender meat and body to the broth as it cooks slowly.
Mutton
Contributes rich meaty flavour and fat that enriches the broth.
Roasted fowl
Adds roasted, savoury flavour and collagen-rich body to the broth.
Leeks
Contribute mild sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and colour to the broth.

The step that matters

Maintaining a steady boil for 6 hours. A gentle, steady simmer keeps the broth clear and lets collagen and connective tissue break down slowly. A hard, rapid boil would emulsify fat into the liquid and cloud the broth, while letting it drop too low stalls extraction of flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, veal, mutton, carrot, turnip, leek, celery):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, veal, mutton, carrot, turnip, leek, celery. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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